Rhonda and I pivoted from grilled chicken breast marinated in greek yogurt to chicken drums to baby back ribs in the span of 30 minutes or so Sunday morning. We’d settled on drums but she spied some previously frozen ribs on sale while we were prowling ShopRite, so we got those. My notion was to sous vide them, but that task,I learned, is better suited to an overnight bath at a low temp than a four-or-five-hour dip in the tank. I realized I might be able to sous vide passable ribs in the same time it would probably take me to smoke them, so smoke them I did.

I didn’t have any smoke wood, which was an oversight on my part, and I also ran out of charcoal briquettes,; careful application of the Minion Method, using lump charcoal, nicely checked off both boxes.